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Community hero, 2009: Christopher Wynn, helps others adjust to physical challenges
Christopher Wynn isn't shy about wheeling up to the bed of a patient with a spinal cord injury.
"I'll just start talking," said Wynn, 39, who has been using a wheelchair for 17 years. "I can tell if a guy doesn't want me there, but the majority do. The hospital can be a really lonely place."
Wynn, a peer counselor and volunteer at the Louis Stokes Veterans Administration Medical Center, puts patients at ease chatting about anything from his own experiences to the weather. But no matter how casual the conversation, the longtime Broadview Heights resident has a message:
"Don't give up, don't quit. Have hope."
Hope, Wynn said, is something doctors failed to give him in 1993 when he was paralyzed after an accident in Hawaii while he was serving in the Air Force. Running along the beach, Wynn dived into the ocean, hit his head and crushed the fourth cervical vertebra in his neck.
"That was it. I couldn't move a thing." Wynn waited helplessly for the waves to move him close enough to shore for friends to hear the injured man's cries for help.
